As always, Chris Evans has a keen insight into the backup market. He recently updated a post about Rubrik’s acquisition of Datos IO to add in some additional perspective on the NoSQL backup market. With Cohesity acquiring Imanis Data, Chris sees this as both companies trying to bridge the gap between traditional backup and data management, something always easier said than done.

In this paper, Chris Evans outlines Scality’s Zenko platform. This acts as a storage controller across object stores, whether on-prem or in the cloud. This draws on much of what Chris saw from Scality at Storage Field Day last year.

Ben Kepes saw Rubrik present at Cloud Field Day 2 back in July of 2017. Here he talks about Rubrik’s newest product, Radar, designed to protect customers against ransomware. Ben has been continuously impressed with Rubrik’s development and expects them to IPO and become a major player in the industry in the near future.

In this post, Ben Kepes looks at recent moves by Rubrik as indicative of an upcoming IPO. This includes adding Microsoft’s John Thompson to their board, naming former Atlassian CFO Murray Demo to the same position, and strong sales numbers. We’ll be keeping an eye on the company to see if 2018 is the year of their IPO.

In this piece, Chris Evans shares his thoughts on Rubrik’s recent acquisition of Datos IO. This makes sense as a way for the company to grab an early leader in the NoSQL backup market, and increases their overall backup capability surface area. Overall he sees this down the line of providing another way for Rubrik to transition from backup into an overall data management company.

Last summer, Lino Telera attended his first Cloud Field Day. While the presenting companies showed off a vast array of products, platforms and solutions, for Lino the overall theme came down to being more dynamic with data across the cloud. He gives his impressions of all the presenters, from HPE’s Nimble Cloud Volumes to Nirmata’s SaaS solution to close the gap between developers and sysadmin.

At Cloud Field Day last year, Mariusz Kaczorek heard from HPE about InfoSight and Cloud Volumes. Both show the integration of the company’s recent acquisition of Nimble Storage. For Mariusz, the advances he saw with InfoSight are a clear signal that the autonomous data center is well on its way.

At Cloud Field Day this summer, Mariusz Kaczorek saw Gigamon’s latest solution for hybrid cloud visibility. He got a deep dive into the Gigamon Visibility Platform for AWS, which uses agents on an EC2 instance to mirror traffic to gain insights into what’s going through the cloud.

Containers may have a lot of advantages. But when it comes to using Kubernetes to orchestrate them, complexity starts to become a substantial issue for organizations. Tom Hollingsworth looks at Nirmata’s presentation from Cloud Field Day as a way to address this. They offer an orchestration layer on top of Kubernetes, that lets organizations spent more time working on their business intent, and less time learning configuration.

Lino Telera got a look at what HPE is doing post-acquisition with Nimble Storage at Cloud Field Day earlier this year. From this, Lino looks at HPE Nimble Cloud Volumes, which provides the ability to “share” storage resources across cloud providers. He saw this as an important piece for any organization looking to embrace a hybrid cloud deployment.

At Cloud Field Day this summer, Mariusz Kaczore got to see the latest updates from Rubrik. Mariusz really liked to Rubrik’s approach to backups, not focusing on monitoring backup jobs directly, but instead measuring results against a SLA. He also highlighted their Rubrik OnCloud, which lets you archive VMs in the cloud.

Scality presented at Cloud Field Day this summer. Lino Telera reviews what he saw at their presentation, looking at their software-defined storage solution that provides a scale-out filesystem that can access and move data across multi-cloud deployments.

In this piece, Cloud Field Day delegate Tim Crawford was quoted on what he saw on Rovius Cloud from Accelerite at the event. Tim find the solution, which is built on the former CloudStack platform, easier to use and manage compared to OpenStack.

Joep Piscaer reviews how Accelerite acquired CloudStack and turned it into a key component to their overall cloud offering. This includes Rovius, their Managed CloudPlatform offering, with CloudPlatform serving as a Apache CloudStack based Cloud Orchestration platform in a box. Joep thinks it’s an interesting approach to acquire yesterday’s tech and applying it successfully to today’s problems.

Ben Kepes takes a look at the history of CloudStack, which was acquired by Accelerite and renamed to Rovius Cloud. Even though OpenStack appeared to be an ersatz competitor to CloudStack, but lagged in adoption due to investors and vendor adoption. Ben was impressed that Rovius remains server, storage, an hypervisor agnostic, allowing organizations to federate on-premises resources with public clouds including AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

Lino Telera gives an in-depth overview of what ServiceNow presented at Cloud Field Day last month. The company offers dedicated PaaS for enterprise customers, focused on providing integration of disparate legacy systems. He really appreciates that the company gives organizations the ability to sandbox POCs without pushing sales in their Developer Program. Lino even played around with it using a basic Jakarta instance.

Aside from being the king of swag at industry trade shows, Chris Bradshaw reviews what makes Rubrik worthy of industry buzz. At VMworld, he got to speak with co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha and Jerry Rijnbeek, Director of Sales Engineering. By owning the entire backup stack, Rubrik is able to quickly allow organizations to implement backup protections and get back to operations in the event of an outage.

After presenting at Cloud Field Day, Eric Shanks has changed the way he views ServiceNow. At the event, the company showed how they can serve as an central management plane for business operations, unifying management and allowing automation between disparate services. In the end, Eric finds their true value as a platform themselves. “ServiceNow is more than just an ITSM tool these days. It’s a business tool.”